My First Trip To A Foreign Country–Paris, France 2008

I was 26 years old when I first left my country. It’s not something I’m proud of to be honest, and I’m pissed right now that I didn’t do it sooner. Nothing I can do about it now though, and I’m hugely grateful that a friend of mine was looking for someone to go with him to Paris for one week. It was a bit of an accident, since he was supposed to go with his sister, and she changed her mind two weeks before they were supposed to leave. The result was my first trip abroad and the first time I traveled on an airplane, so I’m happy that my appetite for travels was awakened, accident or not.

The budget

It was definitely not a cheap trip, and if I remember correctly I paid 330 euros ($400) for the round-trip airplane ticket (bought 2 weeks before I left during the high season unfortunately), plus another 350 Euros for my share for a 7 nights stay in a twin room, in a small boutique hotel, just a few minutes away from the Eiffel Tower.

Add to that the cost of the meals (two per day in restaurants), which was another 200 euros probably for 6 days, with the breakfast being 10 euros and a normal lunch 15 to 30 euros. It didn’t help that I was mostly a beer drinker at the time, in a country where wine is the cheaper option.

All in all, it was an expensive trip, definitely not the backpacker kind, but definitely worth it.

What I Did

This is the first post of a series of articles with the things I saw and did while in Paris in 2008, during my first trip in a foreign country. While I did see many of the must see objectives of Paris (Eiffel Tower, a Seine cruise, Louvre, Champs Elysees, Notre-Dame Cathedral, Versailles Palace, Disney), quite a few other objectives were missed during that short stay and I definitely want to go back to Paris at some point. No other city I’ve visited since then has left its mark on me as Paris did.

On the bucket list front, I’ve checked off things like flying on an airplane, visiting Paris, seeing an IMAX movie for the first time (in French, so I only understood around 50% of the movie) and eating snails.

Look forward to a series of posts about Paris during the next couple of weeks and the things I saw while I was there.